I woke up this morning to a house to clean, mail to open, bills to pay, laundry to wash, dry, fold, and put away, snow to shovel, and groceries to buy, not to mention kids to keep from killing each other, and breakfast, lunch, and dinner to make, serve, and clean up.
This is not a post about marriage and housework. S is at work, so all these things are my responsibility, but he's been doing lots of laundry and he even helped clean up after the dinner party that he didn't get to attend because at the last minute he had to work, though the party had been planned because he didn't have to work. In other words, he's trying to do his share.
This is not a post about the class politics of housework. At the moment, I employ nobody to do any of these things that I need to do, so I can feel neither self-satisfied nor guilty in any of the dimensions in which domestic employees inspire self-satisfaction or guilt in supposed feminists.
This is not a post about the pleasure of housework, because, frankly, that is something I just can't access. Not in a providing for my family kind of way, not in a zen kind of way, not in any kind of way.
Well, that's not true, exactly. At the moment that the house is clean, I am happy, but for me, in my house, that moment is absolutely shadowed by the fact that the house will be a mess again momentarily, unless I continue, constantly, endlessly, to clean it.
That is, my issue with housework is profoundly ontological. I do these things, that I do not enjoy doing, because they create a state I need, even, occasionally, enjoy (cleanliness, clothes to wear, dinner on the table), but that state, in its very essence, contains the seeds of its own undoing (wearing the clothes will make them dirty which means they will need to be washed again), which will once again force me to do things I do not enjoy doing, in an endless insatiable cycle. (Lacan must be applicable here somehow, but I'm too worn out from cleaning the house and doing the laundry and dealing with the tantrums to figure it out.) (And I know the Buddhist approach would be to embrace it, but, let's face it, I'm no Buddhist.)
I'm sure there are people who get pleasure from housework, and I say more power to them and wish them all the best. But I'd rather be reading, or writing, or running, or talking with a friend, or hanging out with my kids. Which is to say, ultimately, that this post could simply be replaced by a well-worn quote from one of my bibles, Free to Be You and Me.
Housework is just no fun.
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3 comments:
That's the truth, Ruth.
That is too true. I hate doing things that I'm just going to have to do again, like laundry or dishes or feeding my children. At dinner time as I scrounge around for something to feed them I often say "But I just fed you at lunch time!" I like my work to be of a more permanent nature.
Oh for cryin out loud! I SO do not love housework. Though I tell ya, after having been ill so much over the last five-plus years, being ABLE to do the dishes etc is really really nice. But mostly I agree with Hannah in "Little Women": "Housekeeping ain't no joke."
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